The Vacuity of the Political "We"

One can barely read a newspaper or listen to a politician's speech without hearing the standard "we as a society" or its derivatives. "You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society," said President Barack Obama about NSA surveillance. Even some economists, who should know better, fall into this trap. Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist and an architect of Obamacare, declared: "We've decided as a society that we don't want people to have insurance plans that expose them to more than six thousand dollars in out-of-pocket expenses."